But for all its apparent success, WSEP is not self-sufficient in a for-profit sense, revealing the structural flaws in trying to lend money efficiently at the bottom of the economy. Forty percent of its $1-million annual budget comes from the state and federal government, 50% from private foundations, and the balance from fees paid by clients.
Evans says WSEP will likely never be self-sufficient because her clients need ongoing technical support and advice, not just money. The organization holds free monthly orientations for women who might be interested in its program. Two years ago the attendance was around 35 women a session. Now it ranges from 50 to 80.
Evans believes that the jump in interest reflects a changing economy. In the inner city, people are losing jobs, and those jobs are disappearing for good. Second, she says, the rising interest reflects a desire by many inner-city women to escape the debilitating clutches of welfare. "In other countries you have to do something because there is no welfare system." Here, welfare is an option but an increasingly unpalatable one, claims Evans, a situation in which "too often the safety net becomes just a noose around someone's neck."
Evans thinks the value of a program like WSEP lies as much in its human payoff as in its business payoff. It's a way for people to dig themselves out of the isolating experience of poverty and to develop a sense of self by connecting with other people whose experiences they share. It's as much a community-development project as it is a program to foster entrepreneurship. "People in poverty live such isolated lives," says Evans. "We want to reduce that isolation and free people up to address other issues in their lives."
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Economic Self-Sufficiency
Redefining What's Possible
A key issue for Connie Evans is teaching what she labels "economic self-sufficiency." She acknowledges that many women who come to WSEP will not immediately start businesses. Nonetheless, she hopes they will at least gain a sense of possibility in their lives. They will know that down the road, opportunity may present itself, and that they will be able to grasp it. To the typical entrepreneur the feeling that anything is possible, that he or she can make things happen, is a sixth sense. That confidence is always there. To women like Deborah Payne it is a learned trait.
Payne is a dressmaker and designer who has been sewing for her friends since she was 14, yet she has spent most of her time and talent in recent years just earning a paycheck. She wanted to break free from the long hours, low wages, and other sweatshop conditions that defined her working existence. On the other hand, she was a shy, soft-spoken woman, a single mother, a person who felt vulnerable. "There were times when I would feel something, but I would just never speak out." A couple of years ago she came to WSEP and got a loan, which bought her a new sewing machine and gave her a chance to go into business for herself.
Payne says the virtue of WSEP, beyond emboldening her to start a business, is that "you realize that you are not alone." Her lending circle has become a support group for her on a range of issues. Sitting in WSEP's office one recent morning, she recalls a disagreement she was having with her teenage son before school, in the middle of which a member of the lending circle called. Told by Payne what was happening, the other woman asked Payne to put her son on the phone. They talked awhile and straightened the matter out.
Debra Davis, another WSEP client and a borrower, is more assertive, a model of sorts for Payne. But she, too, has known loneliness and doubt. She has just been better at hiding it. "No one really understood me," says Davis, who sees herself as "an artist and an entrepreneur." A year ago, she says, she was just "another person crying the blues." She had been designing and sewing clothes for private clients part-time and wanted to start her own business, but she was discouraged by friends and family who wanted her to stick to her full-time job behind the cosmetics counter in a downtown department store. "I would be so depressed. I had to force myself to go to work each day." Then she saw an ad for WSEP, and she liked the way it was phrased: "Give your best hours to yourself." It brought her to WSEP -- and into her own business full-time.
Through past connections she landed an audience with the publishers of the Spiegel catalog, and that led to the catalog's carrying some of her designs targeted at the African American community. The response was so strong that before Davis knew it, she had four people sewing for her. The day I spoke with her, she was late to our appointment because of a flat tire she had gotten earlier on her way to Spiegel with some sketches. "A year ago, if this had happened to me, I would have just sat there and cried. Now I had somebody to call who could come and pick up the sketches while I got the tire fixed."
Shanta Nurullah was a part-time storyteller while working for the Chicago Housing Authority. After being laid off from her full-time job for the third time in a year, she prayed that the unemployment office "would just lose my number." She says, "WSEP helped me conceptualize what I wanted to do." With a peer group of 12 other women, she took a 12-week course in which she learned how to focus her ideas and put them into a business plan. She turned her part-time story-telling into a full-time business that now supports her and her four children, one of whom is about to go to college.
Looking back on her life before WSEP, Nurullah says, "I saw a lot of people who were stuck. They were afraid of what was on the outside. People in public housing were paying more for rent than I was, but they wouldn't leave it because if they lost their jobs, they at least had a roof over their heads." Nurullah says that when women come to WSEP, it's a transforming experience. "People come here, and the experience empowers them to start a business. Their families benefit; they see the motivation, the initiative that people take."
